Modern storage systems are put to a variety of commercial uses. For example, they are coupled with host systems to store data for purposes of product development, and large storage systems are used by financial institutions to store critical data in large databases. For most uses to which such storage systems are put, it is very important that they be highly reliable so that critical data is not lost. “Highly available” storage systems are provided for this reason. High availability is provided, for example, by duplicating data across disks, and by making sure that cached data can be written back to disks in the event of a failure. Furthermore, reserved disk areas containing the storage system's operating system and other critical software may be “mirrored” between disks, so that if one disk fails, the mirrored copy of the reserved area can still be accessed. However, there are other vulnerable parts of storage systems that, in the event of a failure, can cause catastrophic results. For example, the power system is obviously extremely important to the reliability of the entire storage system. Some known storage systems provide separate power supplies for each disk so that, if a power supply fails, only one disk is lost. But, this is a very expensive and space consuming solution. Also, the manner in which individual disk drives in a storage system are addressed is important to the reliability of the system, since a fault in addressing would prevent access to data on one or more disks. It would be advantageous to provide a storage system in which only a few power supplies can power many disks in a highly reliable manner. It would be further desirable to provide a storage system in which disk addressing is highly reliable.